All posts tagged Environmental Protection Agency

The White House will continue to quietly lay the groundwork for an international climate accord – an agreement that is key to a durable legacy for the president – with an eye toward the Paris talks in December. Read More »

The White House is trying to put a price on delaying action on climate change.

Aiming to create a sense of urgency around its actions to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the White House is issuing a report Tuesday that argues that the longer the delay, the more future generations will bear costs.

The report doesn’t put a dollar amount on what the administration says is the price of inaction. Instead, it employs a pair of economic models to predict its magnitude. Read More »

President Barack Obama is tackling climate change through regulation. With a proposed rule announced Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency is using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from hundreds of power plants across the U.S. though complex proposal running hundreds of pages. Read More »

Thanks to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gases are considered air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency has to do something to control them. But the act is particularly ill-suited to controlling a non-toxic global pollutant. The law requires the EPA to set separate emissions guidelines for each category of existing stationary pollution sources–one for power plants, another for oil refineries and so on–and then each state is supposed to write a compliance plan for every category. This fractured process is likely to lead to large differences among states and across industries.

The president and chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, has a list of issues he hopes President Barack Obama will discuss in the State of the Union address on Tuesday night—but the president may not be recite them exactly as Mr. Gerard would like.

The oil-industry group and Mr. Gerard have developed sets of messages linking energy industry growth with the Obama Administration’s goals. They include reducing inequality, a leading subject for this year’s SOTU, and increasing jobs, both of which, Mr. Gerard says, could be aided by new energy policies. Read More »

Mr. McConnell –and 40 other Republican senators including fellow Kentuckian Rand Paul—filed a resolution of “disapproval” against the agency’s proposed rules, which were formally offered last week in the Federal Register.

The regulations would encourage the use of carbon capture technology to minimize emissions, which the industry says would effectively prevent the building of new coal-fired plants. Read More »

Mr. Oliver’s remarks at a Washington think tank Wednesday were the latest of a series of clear nudges to the Obama administration to approve the 875-mile pipeline that would carry oil sands from Alberta to Nebraska, and eventually to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

“Make no mistake: Canadian resource development and export, including from the oil sands, will continue, Keystone or no Keystone,” he said, taking direct aim at environmentalists who hope that blocking the high-profile pipeline will be a death knell for future development of Canada’s heavy crude… Read More »

Ahead of President Barack Obama‘s State of the Union address next week, a senior House Republican said Tuesday the president is in for a fight if he takes an aggressive approach to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Rep. Ed Whitfield, the Kentucky Republican who is chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, on Tuesday outlined a nuanced view on climate change, saying it is clear global temperatures are rising but questioning “alarmist” positions on climate change. He noted that “market forces” were already causing the U.S. to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Read More »

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